Food 4 Thought

Becoming SuperHuman is a goal for many people. The term ‘SuperHuman’ has sprung up the last few years to describe something you can achieve if you get the right amount of sleep, the right vitamins and minerals, move in the right ways, and eat the right things.

The idea is that through various bio hacks and lifestyle changes, you can become something greater than human -- a SuperHuman. It’s a great marketing strategy and resonates with many who feel less than human -- in other words, they’re tired all the time, always hungry, stressed and in lots of pain.

I think that the term is necessary in today’s culture and health & wellness industry. But I also think it’s an insult to the extraordinary human mechanism and design.

Why? Because the human is inherently “super” -- the adjective is unnecessary. The scale that we use to define a healthy human has shifted. Imagine a linear, x-axis scale where the 0 is the average human of today and SuperHuman is off somewhere to the right -- say, around 100. That’s how it is today.

But I believe the average human of today is actually way to the LEFT of 0, you know, like in the negatives and that the 0, or “baseline human”, is an extraordinary thing in its own right, all by itself.

**As a sidenote -- humans have gotten unhealthier and unhealthier over the last several decades for a number of reasons which include Government guidelines, the belief that high cholesterol causes heart disease, the industrialization of the food industry, and the boom in the pharmaceutical industry -- all things that take the blame out of the unsuspecting and unhealthy humans’ control. Not all blame is removed, but a ton of it is...

Back to the point -- the human body is the most complex and miraculous gadget on the planet. Nothing matches its ingenuity or marvel. This organism that uses unbelievable functions to fight off disease and adapt to surroundings in amazing ways -- not to mention the other billion incredible things the body can do like neuroplasticity or synaptogenesis -- has been mistreated and allowed to function at a less than ideal capacity.

And now we’ve come to the point where being healthy is something that is beyond human -- SuperHuman.

I believe the term SuperHuman is redundant.

Describing a healthy human as SuperHuman is like saying a Large NFL Lineman, or my Beautiful Wife, or a Worthless Cat, or an Annoying Mosquito, or Insane DennisRodman.

The adjectives preceding each noun are unnecessary since the noun is inherently what the adjective is describing.

Like a Hormonal Pregnant Lady, or a Stupid Man (yes we’re all stupid in our own different and stupid ways), a Faithful Beagle, or a Stinky Gas Station Bathroom.

A human in its most baseline and properly functioning state is, inherently, extraordinary. But humans have skewed the definition of “health” by not taking care of humans properly.

All of the cars’ crew chiefs mistreat the machines. They don’t perform proper maintenance. Oil isn’t changed. Transmissions aren’t flushed. They run the engines way too long at the wrong times in the harsh weather. They put a low grade, synthetic fuel in the tank that the car can technically run on because it’s an amazing specimen of technology and can adapt to a less the optimal fuel, but it’s not the fuel the engine was designed to use.

They leave the cars in the elements all year round -- rain, sun, snow, wind. All the cars are treated this way. It’s the norm. To the mass of crew chiefs, there is no convincing scientific or compelling evidence to make them think that anything they’re doing is causing any harm.

Now imagine that one of the cars does receive proper maintenance from its crew chief. The engine’s oil is changed. Gaskets are replaced. Tires are rotated. This car is kept under a sheet in a garage and only run when it needs to be run. It receives the fuel that it was designed to use. This car wins every race on the circuit and laps just about every other car on the track. This car is taken care of. The other crew chiefs think this car is extreme and its crew chief is crazy, off his rocker, and doing things that couldn’t possibly be expected from a “normal” crew chief.

Should this lone car be defined as a “SuperCar”? Or is it just an incredible piece of engineering and machinery designed by millions of hours of testing and brain power that is functioning how it was designed to function?

Becoming SuperHuman is nothing more than being this lone car -- it’s allowing the most incredible thing on the planet do what it was designed to do -- be extraordinary.

Having to label health as “super” is an insult to the human definition. I believe the term SuperHuman is necessary today, but it’s just a sign that we’ve over-complicated the process of becoming healthy and defining health by underperforming and allowing the most incredible piece of machinery in existence to function below its optimal capacity.

My goal is for humans to re-take control of their humanness, start taking care of themselves and begin functioning in the extraordinary way that the human body is designed to function.

THE FIVE SIMPLY HUMAN FATS

SOME OF MY FAVORITE STUFF

We have all been there. Parenting is really, and I mean really hard. It can take so much out of you. The constant noise in your house, the messes that get left everywhere, the missed sleep, the feeling as if you are never going to get everything (or anything) done. It is in these moments when we can either let ourselves explode and be overwhelmed by parenting or we can find a way to take a breath and take control of the way we parent....

I recently wrote an article about where to start when putting together a workout plan (i.e. how to program your training). In that article, I mentioned that I believe the most important movement is the squat for a variety of reasons, and that people should start there.

So let’s say you’ve mastered the squat and you have some time to start focusing on another movement — what’s the SECOND most important movement?

I've never done this, but I bet if I were to go back in time into the wilderness and find a human (aka a naked mountain person) living like a human is designed to live and asked that human what he or she does for exercise everyday, that he or she would give me a quizzical look then continue picking bugs out of his or her body hair.

I haven't run more than 2 miles in just under a year. So why would I run 13.1 miles with absolutely ZERO conventional training?

Good question. Because I'm a complete idiot? That's debatable but not the reason I will present.

It was an experiment. I wanted to see what would happen and how I would feel running that distance after only doing heavy resistance training, moving slow a lot (walking), and very short, intense interval training sessions - aka moving in ways that resemble natural human movement patterns.

Here's one other thing to think about -- imagine a pipe in the ground. If it is clear of debris and in a straight line, things can flow through it fast and with little effort.

Now take that pipe and put a bunch of kinks in it and maybe jam a rock against the outside in a few places. Now all of the sudden it's much harder for things to flow through that pipe. And not only that, but the more bends in the pipe, the more things ram up against the sides of the pipe which damages the pipe.

It's a very western idea -- treating symptoms while completely ignoring the cause. The root of the cause for most back pain is actually something much easier and cheaper. Even cheaper than buying a mustard packet.